I read an interesting article in an old issue of Wired Magazine this week about tapes of the blurred images of the first step taken on the surface of the moon back in 1969. There were three interesting aspects about this story, two of which are unrelated to the third, so bear with me here.
First, it seems that NASA has lost the archive tape of that video transmission; and second, if the people who have taken on the project to locate the tape ever find it, there is only one machine in the whole world that can play it. Im not going to go into a lot of detail here, but scientists had to devise a special camera and video protocol to be able to send the images back to Earth. The images were transmitted directly to a base station in Australia where the footage was converted to US broadcast standards for TV. As the feed was received at the base station, it was recorded to huge reels of magnetic tape for archiving.
Recently, there has been some interest in retrieving those images, because with todays technology, there is a probability that much more detailed views can be achieved. Except, theyve lost the tapes. A few reels from about the same time period were discovered and scientists hopefully went searching for a machine to play them…only to find that there is only one known machine that will handle the format, and it was only months from being destroyed as outdated.
Now, this is a sad state of affairs, but we can all relate. How many of the generation that remembers the Moon Walk of 1969 also owns numerous VCR tapes of their childrens first steps, first birthdays, first formal dances? Can you find them? And, if you can, how much longer do you think you will have a VCR in the house that will play them?
The third interesting factoid in this article was extremely exciting for me, personally. I didn’t watch the 1969 Moon Walk on TV, but rather listened on the radio, and so had a greater interest in the audio transmission. I sat riveted by the first words of the first man to take the first steps on the moon, and I knew what I heard. It was an elegantly simple statement, one Im sure someone worked very hard to perfect. And for decades, Ive heard that statement misquoted as: Thats one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind. But that wasn’t what I heard. What I was sure I heard was: Thats one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind. A subtle difference, but very meaningful.
The article I read about the NASA visual tapes also casually stated that it was important to find the tapes to correct small misconceptions, since audio engineers had recently been able to discover that Armstrong had actually said …step for a man… Its great to know Ive been right all these years!